Rebooting Your WIP:

You're not making much progress on a story. It's not so much writer's block as writer's constipation. Then revelation strikes! Your protagonist is actually someone else! O noes!

By that I mean your concept of the character is flawed in some fundamental way. Suppose wizards get a set of powers based on their Zodiac sign. Your heroine has been a Sagittarius all along, but now you know she's really a Capricorn. Everything about her has to be re-examined, some of it reworked, some of it trashed.

So what next? Do you drop the idea? Do you start over? Do you let the whole thing simmer for a while?

Had similar notions. Mostly with worlds that, on reflection, really aren't as interesting as I thought they were. Usually they get broken down for parts, by which I mean random elements of them end up contaminating all my other worlds.

I've done that with some of my stuff, but most of it — because I spend a lot of time thinking, planning, daydreaming, etc. before I actually start writing — is as perfect as it's gonna get by the time I actually fire up the word processor, and all I have to do is figure out how to describe it.

I have one WIP I've rather valiantly attempted to save from total failure for awhile now, but the more I chop apart and revamp (up to and including an entire medium shift), the more it strikes me as both overly-ambitious and just not particularly good (and considering that I came up with it in the 7th Grade, this is unsurprising).

I don't so much reboot as reconsider, often expanding upon what I'd initially intended to be an incidental trait or a throwaway remark. This means I often go back and add more foreshadowing for something, but I usually don't need to change things radically.

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